Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Dismantling the Cradle to Prison Pipeline

By Diana Auborg Millner

The Children's Defense Fund released the State of America's Children 2012 Handbook [in August], an annual compilation of national data on child well-being, as well as its Portrait of Inequality which focuses on the state of the most vulnerable black and Latino children and youth in America. While the snapshots are sobering for both populations, the report on black children
outlines a stunning set of statistics that paint the contours of CDF's
theory: that black children are fed into a "Cradle to Prison Pipeline" at
higher rates than any other group.

Image from Fairness Works

There is quite a bit of work that has been done on the school-to-prison pipeline
- a confluence of forces, including zero tolerance policies that push
disadvantaged children out of school and in into the criminal justice
system. CDF's Cradle to Prison theory
argues that black children and youth not only face multiple risks, but
that from birth and throughout childhood and adolescence, confront
debilitating obstacles that often push them into premature death,
prison, and failed lives. Some black children face an entire childhood
of hardship and stressors that many adults could not withstand, and
ultimately fall into an "abyss of poverty, hunger, homelessness and
despair."

Hmm, you might think, could they be overstating this? You may even
consider black children that you know who have overcome tremendous odds
and achieved success - proving that some can climb their way out of the
morass of disadvantage that so easily entangles. However, CDF's report
is not a collection of assertions, but rather a fact-based siren warning
that an unacceptably high percentage of black children will meet this fate if adults (you and me) don't figure out how to fix things.

The report walks you through a child's life, who is born into poverty
(black children are nearly four times as likely as white children to
live in extreme poverty) and into a family structure with limited
support (51 percent live with only one mother). When that family
structure breaks down or fails them, the systems step in (black children
are more than twice as likely as white children to be in foster care)
or the systems take away (black children are over six times as likely as
white children to have a parent in prison). For many, the struggle to
live and thrive begins in the womb (black babies were more than twice as
likely as white babies to be born at low birth weight and to mothers
who received late or no prenatal care). Having survived birth, the
developmental disparities start early: at nine months, black babies
score lower on measures of cognitive development than white babies and
at 24 months, the gap in cognitive development has more than tripled
between black babies and white babies. On average, black children
arrive their first day of school with lower levels of school readiness
than white children.

When the Cradle to Prison and School to Prison pipelines converge, we
see kids funneled into inadequate education facilities with less
qualified teachers and high rates of out-of-school suspension (black
students represent 46 percent of all students who received multiple
out-of-school suspensions). The achievement gap widens each year and by
eighth grade, 86 percent of black public school students cannot read at grade level and 87 percent
cannot do math at grade level. What happens when these forces push
black youth out of school? They drop out (64 percent of black students
graduate high school on time) and find a hostile labor market (as of
June 2012, almost one in three black youth age 16 to 24 was unemployed)
and if living in a violent neighborhood, they will likely find
themselves dodging bullets rather than applying to college. Shockingly,
over 90 percent of firearm deaths of black children and teens in 2009
were homicides.
Even those kids that "make it", overcoming hardships and escaping the
pipelines, can still suffer negative health outcomes as adults as a
result of these experiences. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study
is a groundbreaking study that showed a relationship between early
exposure to trauma and negative health outcomes as an adult, including
chronic diseases. What the ACE study suggests is that the cradle to
prison pipeline has enormous costs to society, from the high costs of
incarcerating black youth and adults to the inevitable burden on our
health systems.In a recent blog
on this report, CDF founder Marian Wright Edelman does not mince words:
"I hope this report will be a piercing siren call that wakes up our
sleeping, impervious and self-consumed nation to the lurking dangers of
epidemic child neglect, illiteracy, poverty and violence." Only a nation
as wealthy as ours and gripped with indifference could hang back and
watch this happen.

Read the reports. There is ample, credible information out there to
warn us that our children are in crisis as never before. It should be
enough to spark outrage or at minimum, halt the budget assault on
education, food security and other programs designed to protect the
poorest children. Marian Wright Edelman hits the nail on the head - the
changes that need to happen will not come fromWashington or state
capitols, though resources and sound policy are critical.

Armed with these stats, we should make noise
--- in our churches, schools, community and civic organizations
demanding both national action and embracing collective responsibility
to save our children. Our houses of worship should distribute this
report and prophetic voices on behalf of the most vulnerable and
marginalized children must rise from the pulpit. Community
leaders and black parents must band together and demand a crisis level
response, but also fully embrace their ability to protect their own
children from these forces. Recognizing the havoc community violence
wreaks on children, every locality grappling with epidemic levels of
violence should make stemming violence
a top priority. This is a generation of children with the dimmest life
prospects ever. On one level, we should all be ashamed of ourselves,
willing to soul search and ask, what more could I be doing to turn this
tide?

1 comment:

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